I'm tired, so I'll make final impressions brief.
It's a great game, a wonderful homage to RPGs of old (and thus, in a way, refreshing). Narrative gets a little iffy towards the end, but that's to be expected in JRPGs, I think. There were some slight spelling and grammatical errors in the text (some errors were a little glaring like misspelling Stocke's name in some of the timeline summaries, but it's not like the general RPG player would notice it). Stocke is a great protagonist, and didn't do anything that made me roll my eyes or sigh in frustration, something that feels like a rarity in recent JRPGs. He didn't necessarily "develop", but instead more of his multifaceted personality was revealed to the player as a way of showing "development". It was nice.
If you've heard of Radiant Historia, the first thing you probably heard about it was that it had a "Chrono Trigger element" of time travel. It's not as free as CT's time travel, though (ie: go anywhere in 12 000 BC, go anywhere in 600 AD, etc). The timeline works in such a fashion that there are "events" and "nodes" that symbolize various points in time that your characters have been through. The only places that you can time travel to are the nodes, which are usually either the beginning of chapters, near the end of chapters, or at a crucial point in the chapter. If you are doing sidequests, you will have to travel back to one of these nodes (but sometimes, you'll have to play through an entire segment of a chapter in order to get to the sidequest area, which is a bit of a pain sometimes).
At this point, you might be asking, "If time-travel nodes are at the beginning of chapters or at crucial plot points, then wouldn't you be forced to watch cutscenes and scroll through dialogue you've seen before?" Luckily, no. You can fast-forward through the text you've already seen with X, or you can just press the Start button to skip the dialogue scene altogether! Very convenient.
This game also has multiple endings: there are bad, good and true endings. If you meet a bad end (even the
sidequests have bad ends), it's not the end for you. You just have to go back and make the "right" decision. The true ending is achieved by doing 10 particular sidequests. The best part of this game is that nothing is missable. You can still venture back and forth in time to see what you've missed or what you've yet to accomplish in both past and present. A caution: sidequests aren't explicitly marked. You may have to ask other RH players if there are sidequests in a certain chapter, or you may have to follow a FAQ.
Also, there is no quicksave. Save points are very plentiful in the game, but sometimes when you do grind and are nowhere near a save point when you need to do something else, it feels like an oversight. It's just a small complaint, though. Doesn't bear a ton on the game itself.
Radiant Historia's refreshing nature, however, truly comes from the battle system. It's sheer proof that a game does not need elaborate smoke and mirrors, or "complicated-looking" level up systems. It relies on simplicity with a minor tweak. The battle system is a great take on turn-based combat. It never gets boring. Enemies can be pushed and pulled in different directions on a 3x3 grid. Enemy position is rather important: if they are in the front row, they will do more damage to your party. If they are in the back, they'll do less damage. What is the best way to maximize your results in battle is to bunch up the enemies on one area of the grid and combo them with your characters. Enemy and ally turn order is shown on the top screen, and you have the ability to swap turns with either foe or friend to maximize the effects of your combo. Characters will also obtain a sort of "limit break gauge", and have an inventory of three skills to use it up.
Characters gain skills as they level up, and all playable characters gain XP even if they're not in-battle. The encounter rate is good, and there are no random battles. All enemies can be seen on the screen. Stocke also has the ability to hit an enemy to knock it out and then engage it for a pre-emptive strike. Or he could just knock it out and not fight it. The choice is up to you. Sometimes this mechanic is a little imprecise, but when it works, it feels great to get that jump on your enemy.
As for the soundtrack, I don't really like Shimomura's stuff outside of her Street Fighter II and other SNES music and her Last Ranker score, but this is one I really really enjoyed (despite hearing the same tracks ad nauseam). It's one of the better scores on the DS (outmatched by Masashi Hamauzu's
Sigma Harmonics score, Toshihiko Horiyama's
Apollo Justice score, Yuzo Koshiro's
7th Dragon score, and Takeharu Ishimoto's
The World Ends With You score). However, The soundtrack is too short; 25 tracks doesn't seem like enough for this game, especially when you consider that SNES games had scores that spanned 3 CDs. Hearing the same music repeatedly at some points wasn't really tiresome, but more like, "Eh, I heard this already" and didn't have much of an impact. Shame that the
World Map theme is used as the field theme in a TON of places (also I didn't really like it that much).
When I first heard of Radiant Historia, I figured it'd be like Chrono Trigger through-and-through. While this is true to an extent, I found myself looking for other games I loved dearly in past console generations. I found Final Fantasy VI (steampunk), Final Fantasy Tactics (politics), Suikoden (war, friendship and rebellion) and Tactics Ogre (rebellion) in this. I appreciated what it had to offer, and it certainly deserves a place in any JRPG player's library.
Pros:
+nice narrative
+feels like an homage to RPGs of yore
+great music
+freakin' fun battle system
+depth in simplicity
+can skip cutscenes
+no random battles
Cons:
-soundtrack too short
-no quicksave
-nodes sometimes not placed in convenient places
In-betweens:
-some may consider this game to be very text-heavy
